Work Text:
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
- T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
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One afternoon in May John walks into the bathroom to find Sherlock taking off his face in front of the mirror. Not in the idiomatic sense of taking off makeup, but actually literally taking off his face.
“Augh,” John says, stepping sideways into the towel rack and knocking his towel to the floor. “What the hell are you doing?”
Sherlock is holding the skin that covers his cheekbones and nose in the palm of his hand. It sits there, flat and distorted like a rubber mask. Without it his face is revealed as a delicate and incredible structure of metal cheekbones, artificial cartilage, and tiny wires. John looks at it in the mirror, because he can’t not look but he needs the mediation, something between him and the reality of Sherlock’s face.
“Disguise,” Sherlock says. His lips are still on his face; there’s a seam that cuts across the divot between nose and mouth. When he speaks, John can see the wires move. Fascinated, John steps closer and looks over Sherlock’s shoulder at the picture in the mirror. “I have several alternate faces. I switch them out if I need a really good disguise.”
“That case with the hair, last month,” John says slowly. “Was that how you made yourself look forty years older? I thought it was just really impressive stage makeup.”
“Makeup is useful for simpler disguises. But yes, that was actual skin.”
In first aid classes John took in the army there were posters on the wall--bodies with windows in them, gaps to show off the body’s different layers, how the insides all fit together. This is a bit like that. But if you stripped the skin off a human face it would be horrifying. This is--unsettling, certainly. Sherlock’s face is the most human part of him, the part that had John so convinced that Sherlock is not just a simple android--at least while they stood on the Underground platform with Moriarty, and in intermittent moments after. Sherlock’s face is so expressive, so incredibly nuanced; it’s what makes him so convincing as a human even when he’s not staring at John with blank, honest doubt.
They haven’t done any maintenance since the encounter with Moriarty. Even if they had, it wouldn’t have been like this. Even when John is looking at the inside of Sherlock’s arms, legs, stomach, his skin cut open for maintenance, it’s possible to pretend he’s just another person. Maybe he has a cybernetic leg, that’s not so strange. His face is still human, and that seems to be what matters.
But there’s no mistaking this. Without a face Sherlock is not human. And it’s a reminder that he never is. Not really.
“Here, hold this,” Sherlock says, and then Sherlock is turning his naked face toward John and depositing the skin in John’s automatically ready hands. It feels a lot like Sherlock’s skin normally feels. Still warm and smooth. No weight behind it, no response to the slight unsteadiness in John’s hands. But still recognisably skin.
John is holding Sherlock's skin. Fuck.
He tears his mind away from the sensation of skin on his hands and looks back at the mirror image of Sherlock. "What are you putting on a disguise for?" he asks. "You don't have a case on."
"I'm going out to check in with some contacts. This is the face they know me by." And he reaches into a box that's perched on the back of the sink and lifts out a second skin. John leans over to look closer. The box is full of a preservative liquid recognisably similar to that used to maintain medic droids, if a slightly different colour; Sherlock shakes the skin a bit to get it off.
The combination of Sherlock's voice saying ordinary Sherlock things and his unfamiliar, alien robotic face is almost too much for John. It's fucking with his head, and it shouldn't, because he knows what Sherlock is. He’s not surprised. He's a roboticist, for fuck's sake. Weird shit like peeling robots' faces off is what he does.
John holds his palms full of skin out in front of him like he's begging for something and watches with a sinking feeling in his stomach as Sherlock fits the nose shape in the new skin over his own nose and lines up the edges over his cheekbones. John watches his long fingers pressing down the seams, watches the skin almost instantaneously knit itself back together. The last glimpse of metal disappears and Sherlock is human once again. But he's not.
The new face makes him look less sharp. It blends in to the rest of his features without looking out of place, but it changes him completely. His nose is rounder, stubbier, and very slightly freckled, and the lines of his cheekbones are blurred. There’s something still very Sherlockian about the twist of his mouth, especially when he turns to John and raises his eyebrows. He’s asking for John’s opinion and John is holding his face.
“Looks good,” John offers. It feels insufficient. With Sherlock turned toward him the bathroom suddenly feels very small. John shifts his weight back and can feel the empty towel rack almost pressing into his spine. John remembers suddenly that he came in here to use the toilet, but he finds the weight of his bladder a useful tether to reality.
Sherlock slouches. The expression on his face changes, but it takes a minute before it arrives at its final form, as if it’s booting up. His eyebrows drop, the look in his eyes softens, his mouth becomes less combative. Abruptly Sherlock is gone, replaced by a man John doesn’t know. He’s still wearing Sherlock’s clothes, but they seem to hang differently. He still has Sherlock’s hair, but it somehow looks more limp than usual.
John feels the sudden irrational need to protect the face in his hands, the one that belongs to Sherlock. He can’t hand it over to this stranger. Sherlock entrusted it to him.
But that’s absurd. The skin in John’s hands isn’t Sherlock’s “real” face, any more than the skin clinging to his cheekbones is really his, or the “several alternate faces” that are probably hidden in boxes somewhere. For all John knows the one he’s used to seeing isn’t even the original. That version is John’s version, but there’s no reason why it should feel like the truth.
Something of this feeling must show on John’s own face, because after a moment of being looked at by a stranger John sees Sherlock reappear. Body language and expression become familiar once again, a comforting, previously-unquestioned truth about who Sherlock is. John knows that kind of truth obscures the question of what Sherlock is. He’s comforted anyway.
“You knew this was theoretically possible,” Sherlock says, peering at him with a familiar expression over the arch of a foreign nose. “And you’ve seen me disguised before.”
“I know,” John says, licking his lips. “Just not every day you see a bloke take his face off.” Inwardly John congratulates himself on sounding like he’s joking.
Sherlock looks at him for a moment longer, grey eyes flicking back and forth as they see everything. John smiles. “I have to go,” Sherlock says finally--slowly, like he doesn’t want to.
“Okay.” And John holds out the skin in his hands. Sherlock takes it carefully, sliding his hands into John’s palms to lift it up without touching the inside. Sherlock’s knuckles are warm and damp from the preservative fluid, which makes them stick slightly to John’s skin.
Sherlock tips the skin into the box and John watches it slide slowly into the liquid. It doesn’t make a sound. After a moment Sherlock puts the plastic lid back on the box, pressing down on the edges to make sure it’s secure. He turns on the tap and washes his hands and then stands back to let John do the same. The traces of preservative wash off easily, but the feeling of Sherlock’s smooth cool skin doesn’t. John watches in the mirror as Sherlock stoops to pick up John’s towel from the floor and dry his hands on it.
“You’ve got your own towel,” John says, just for something normal to say. Sherlock shrugs.
“I’m going out. Put the box back, would you? Centre shelf of the bookcase in my bedroom; behind the books.” And before John can respond to this Sherlock is out the door. John can hear his footsteps rapid on the stairs; they sound just like they always do.
John picks up his towel--Sherlock dumped it unceremoniously back on the floor. He dries his hands as thoroughly as he possibly can. He folds the towel. He slides it back over the bar. He makes sure it’s hanging evenly, and then he turns to look at the box still sitting on the back edge of the sink. A vague memory of a fairy story hits him then, the tale of the man who stole the selkie’s seal skin so she was forced to remain in human form.
John looks in the mirror and starts to laugh.